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AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, File Seattle became the first major American city to vote in favor of a $15 minimum wage in 2014. Here students and other supporters demonstrate in favor of a higher minimum wage at the University of Washington, Seattle. trickle-downers.jpg D espite abundant empirical evidence that raising the minimum wage doesn’t lead to job loss, the idea that it does is an article of faith among right-wing economists, and all too often the media report their theological musings as fact. The latest example of such folly popped up in an article in the March 22 Financial Times , a paper that usually knows better than to publish this bushwah. Here’s how the piece, headlined “Battle in Seattle to find employment,” began: In Seattle, the city’s unemployment rate remains steady, at a little over 3 percent even though a rising minimum wage may have driven out low-paying jobs. “We think the immigrant workers are heading to lower-cost regions of the country,” says Jacob Vigdor, an...

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Senate Finance Committee member Senator Sherrod Brown questions Treasury Secretary-designate Steven Mnuchin, on Capitol Hill. trickle-downers.jpg W hat with the president’s war on immigrants, his travel ban, his Putinphilia, his threats to Obamacare, and his cabinet picks, congressional Democrats have spent most of the last month busily saying “No,” with the occasional “Maybe” thrown in by some red-state senators. What congressional Democrats haven’t done is propose some serious alternatives to the economic policies that Trump and congressional Republicans are poised to inflict on the (partly wary, partly unsuspecting) nation. And that’s a mistake. Not right now, perhaps. To some degree, the Democrats’ strategy has to be guided by the same criteria as an ER physician: the most urgent cases first. As well, as my colleague Paul Waldman argued on Monday , the 2018 elections, like all midterms, will largely be about mobilizing one’s base, and nothing stirs the...

(Photo: AP/Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call) Representative Keith Ellison attends a news conference at the Capitol on December 8, 2016. I n normal circumstances, the men and women who chair the Democratic and Republican National Committees labor in a rather just obscurity. As the state and local party organizations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries withered and dissolved before a host of challenges—a national welfare state, television advertising, the rise of primaries and the fall of conventions—the role of the national party chairperson shrank to that of exalted fundraiser. Prominent chairs are now the exception, not the rule. It took hacked emails to give Debby Wasserman Schultz her 15 minutes of notoriety, while Reince Priebus emerged from some dank hole only because he was one of the few Republican officials last spring to stand by Donald Trump. Closer to the norm of anonymity is Preibus’s new replacement at the RNC, Ronna Romney McDaniel. That there is now a hotly contested...

AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli California Governor Jerry Brown discusses his 2017-2018 state budget plan he released at a news conference. This article originally appeared at The Los Angeles Times . Subscribe here . W e’ve seen states fight the federal government before. In 1860 and 1861, it was the states that set off the conflict, taking up arms to oppose the new president. Today, it’s the new president who has initiated the break, vowing to punish states and cities that treat immigrants with respect and the environment with care, and against California and Los Angeles most of all. In his first weeks in office, Donald Trump took dead aim at the policies that state and local governments have put in place to enhance public health and safety. He threatened them with withdrawal of federal funds if they remain sanctuary cities—and no major city has claimed that status longer than Los Angeles, which has barred its police from cooperating in deportation operations since 1979. Trump also has...

(Photo: AP/Christian Torres) Workers continue building a taller fence on the Mexico-U.S. border separating the towns of Anapra, Mexico, and Sunland Park, New Mexico, on January 25, 2017. T he first time I ever saw Terry O’Sullivan, he was sporting a T-shirt on a sunny Los Angeles day more than 15 years ago. I remember him shouting to a crowd of workers and activists, making an impassioned case for immigrant rights. Newly installed as the international president of the Laborers Union , O’Sullivan told his listeners in no uncertain terms that the nation needed to give its undocumented immigrants the right to become citizens, to let them live their lives out of the shadows, to stop raiding the places where they worked. O’Sullivan came by these positions honestly. Of all of America’s current labor leaders, he is the most Irish—he’s a longtime supporter of Sinn Fein, and the chairman of D.C. Friends of Ireland—and knows just how reviled and despised the Irish immigrants who came to this...